Chapter 10 Sports & Outdoors Ecommerce Site Design

Sports and outdoors shoppers aren’t just shoppers –– they are fans. They are passionate. They buy in micro moments of elation or disappointment. And, they are incredibly particular and brand loyal.

Those are all great things for sports and outdoor brands –– but it also means their sites (and social media presence) needs to cater to personalization and treat customers like the individual fans they are. After all, no two teams are the same. Neither are any two customers.

Beyond that, sports and outdoors brands need to convey a sense of “cool.” These items are new, they are trendy, they are customized and they are exactly what you need to take your experience to the next level –– or so every sports and outdoors site should say.

But of course, you can’t just say that. That isn’t cool.

Here’s how 10 brands in the sports and outdoor vertical conveyed their cool and personalized it, to boot.

Our homepage expresses the nature of the site, learning to DIY ski/board tuning is challenging and fun like the sport itself. It site has a clean feel, easy navigation and the learning center provides a comprehensive self help approach. It provides value to both novices and pros alike.

The Wax Wizard is a simple home-built logic-driven site resource for selecting the optimum combination waxes for best performance.

The site also offers a mobile resource to the ski/snowboard enthusiast that draws the customer back, encouraging them to brag to their friends about their great find, thereby exponentially driving more sales/customers without having to increase advertising spending.

The result is that our site has increased sales in every year of its 16 year existence while spending less on advertising each year.

Training Mask is a cutting edge product that has carved out its own niche within the fitness sector. It all started in 2010 when Training Mask CEO Casey Danford created the original Training Mask that put resistance breathing together with sports performance to help make athletes workouts more intense.

Since that first Training Mask, TrainingMask.Inc has grown into one of the most innovative brands in all sports with fitness training devices for men and women. Sold in over 40 countries and large retailers within the U.S.A TrainingMask.Inc looks to expand its reach domestic and abroad in 2017.

Our store was developed for retailing fishing products. Our home page uses rotating images, videos, special offer banners, and featured product banners. The natural navigation to all products is menu driven. All products have detailed information pages and hi-def photos. A blog is maintained as well as an endorsements page and a customer review page.

We have just newly designed our store. Our old store was also with BigCommerce. We have designed this store to increase traffic flow, conversions and optimization.

We believe our new store will enhance our online business. Our added features which includes a Find Your Board feature allows the customer to easily select their product based on their usage and size and will increase conversions.

We think our store is clean, user friendly and is a dramatic improvement from our last store. Our developers worked hard to customize our store.

First it starts with the story behind the company: young entrepreneurial kids that made a real business happen, with the help of their father.

Delano Bats make custom high quality wood bats. They make the products themselves and are selling online and in retail stores.

After having difficulty with their last shopping cart, they came to Evolve Creative to migrate their store into BigCommerce. We did so much more to add customization like the interactive Model Guide, color selector and a live text overlay for engraving. It’s very fun to click through the products and customize your own bat!

Our store has a unique design that incorporates locally shot images throughout the store. Every category, subcategory, and brand has their own unique banner that visually tells a story about our brand in our unique Pacific Northwest way.

We also put a high emphasis on our homepage in establishing the fact that we are much more than a web store, we are a surf shop and a community.

We’re on a mission to provide businesses like yours marketing and sales tips, tricks and industry leading knowledge to build the next house-hold name brand. Don’t miss a post. Sign up for our weekly newsletter.

Tracey Wallace is the Editor-in-Chief at BigCommerce, where she covers all things ecommerce: marketing, design, development, strategy, plus emerging trends, including omnichannel and cloud replatforming.She is also the Founder of Doris Sleep, a bed pillow company selling 100% certified recycled plastic bottle filled pillows in three custom sizes.